A long-awaited step toward standardisation in airport and airline security has come from ICAO, which has adopted a global blueprint for the integration of biometric identification information into passports and other travel documents that can be scanned or read by machines. More than 100 ICAO member states have issued over 700 million such machine-readable travel documents.
The ICAO move settles a policy debate about which part of the body should be measured, by choosing facial recognition as the globally interoperable biometric. The face, as opposed to the hand, the iris or the fingerprint, rated highest in terms of compatibility with key operational considerations; fingers and eyes followed.
The International Organisation for Standardisation is working on developing a global standard for face biometric details. This would allow a common face biometric representation to be used across different software packages, and would also establish standards for image capture, image compression and face orientation/representation within the image.
The security industry is moving toward facial-recognition as the likely high-value area. ICAO, however, will allow states the option of using secondary biometrics to supplement facial recognition for personal identification.
The US Transportation Security Administration is reviewing which biometric identifier it would prefer. It is testing various airport and airline employee security access technologies, but says a biometric employee access programme could be the template for a trusted traveller scheme in which frequent flyers would use biometric identity cards to speed their way through airport security.
ICAO has also selected high-capacity, contactless integrated circuit chips to store identification information in passports, visas, identity cards and other machine-readable documents. Compressed images of one or more biometric would require more data storage capacity than is now available on barcodes.
Source: Airline Business
